Interrogating Inanimate Objects
Everything I've taken, so far
It’s been a month. Have you been in a panic this whole time trying to find me? You may relax. I am merely taking stock.
In the airport you told me I was meddling with things I don’t understand, so I have decided to treat it as advice.
***
I have a headquarters now! Isn’t it grand? Or should I say hideout? Sanctuary? Safe house?
The piece from Lang Son led me here. It had never pulled before, not once, and it began the day I decided to disappear from you. Losing people is its profession.
There is a door in the wilderness. The walls are concrete, the sea is audible, and you will never find it.
On the first morning I left the eleven inside and walked out alone. Twenty steps, and nothing. No warmth at the hip, no murmur through the canvas, for the first time since Pondicherry. I stood in the sun and could not think what I had walked out for. You have had a month of my silence. I did not last a minute of theirs.
Yes, I know. I’ve been practicing more each day.
***
So the month went to introductions. One piece on the table at a time and the rest behind a second door.
The first I took from an ashram in Pondicherry. A man walked into that jail a revolutionary and walked out a saint. On the table it is a flatterer. It warms when I pick it up, and warms more when I put off picking up the others. I am watching for symptoms.
The second I found in a temple on an unnamed island off Sumatra, where the last keeper of a silat school trained beside it every morning until he died on the floor. This one disapproves of me, and it has made its expectations felt. I have not decided whether to indulge it. It can tell.
My guide came out of the roots of a tree by a stream near Lang Son, beside the bones of a legionnaire who deserted his column in 1893. Your people searched my hotel room in Hanoi two days too early.
One correction, while we are on that country: the American pilot who vanished there in 1971 is not dead. Lost but adjacent, and sometimes overlapping. Tell Mike, or don’t. The DPAA forms have no box for it.
In Australia you found me on my way to Rotomahana. Your own institution surveyed that lake in 1859, and the volcano hid the piece before you could. It went down almost 200 feet with the Pink Terraces. I dived. I like this one. It’s soothing.
The seven from the reef at Butaritari came up in porpoise escort, small scattered things nothing had touched in a long time. You will have no record of them. They are feral and delighted with each other, and they treat me as a curiosity. They want a purpose.
Three more I did not obtain, in case your bookkeeping has drifted. Caysasay you logged as retrieved, but if you check your inventory it will be missing. It returned to the well in the Philippines. The Boulia shard, at the end of that long Australian trail, is broken and scattered, which I suppose is how you like them. And the piece in the cupboard on Beqa is hidden and forgotten already, at no cost to you. I might go back for it one day. Undecided.
***
I am curious what your organization knows about them, and on whose authority it operates. Are you told, or are you just its agent? Don’t tell me. I wouldn’t trust the answer, and I like to figure things out myself.
A month of conversation with things that do not use words leaves a person wanting one that does. See you on the hunt!
— N.
Between 1941 and 1945, Japanese garrisons fortified hundreds of Pacific atolls and islands, pouring thousands of reinforced-concrete works into coral rock: bunkers, blockhouses, gun emplacements, seaplane ramps. Most were never demolished. They stand today, unmarked and unmaintained, absorbed into reef and jungle.
